Insomniac Modernism

Abstract

This book has tried to convey a sense of a history of modern insomnia, and in doing so simultaneously has tried to give an impression of what the condition is like, riddled as it is with a particular array of valuations and contradictions. Insomnia has been shown to be a condition far richer than the mere inability to sleep, evincing particular phenomenologies and vicious cycles and paradoxes: of a hyperactive exhaustion, of a reappropriation of a body and mind overburdened by techno-utility, of numbness in super-sensitivity, of the ironic inability to control one’s self in relinquishment of the faculty of control. Through all these antithetical qualities, however, insomnia has remained an unambiguously lonely, solitary experience. It goes on in the privacy of our own individual consciousness. I think, therefore I am insomniac.

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Notes

1.

Insomnie fiévreuse in the original French, published in Le Figaro in 1909. See: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Mary Ann Caws, ed., Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2001), 187. Emphasis mine.Google Scholar

Bertram Dobell, The Laureate of Pessimism: A Sketch of the Life and Character of James Thomson (“B.V.”) (London: The author, 1910), 43.Google Scholar

44.

Mills, “‘The Truth of Midnight’: Apocalyptic Insomnia in James Thomson’s the City of Dreadful Night,” 123. Mills is here responding to the essay by William Sharpe, “Learning to Read the City,” Victorian Poetry 22, no. 1 (1984): 68.Google Scholar

For more on the ambivalence to technology by the later futurists (or post-Futurists), see Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 245.Google Scholar

65.

Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and Its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980), 174. Originally published in F.T. Marinetti, F. T. Marinetti Presenta I Nuovi Poeti Futuristi (Roma,: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia, 1925), 83.Google Scholar

66.

Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T.S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2002), 237.Google Scholar